RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — In 2022, Democrat Wiley Nickel ran as a moderate and narrowly won North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District by about 9,000 votes. Two years later, current Congressman, Republican Brad Knott, ran as a conservative and entered the House of Representatives with more than 70,000 votes.
The voters have not changed their minds. Politicians have changed their voters.
Legislative power controlled by the Republicans redraw state congressional map to turn what was one of the last swing districts in the South into a safe GOP seat. Lawmakers split the rectangular, hourglass-shaped 13th District that carved out Democratic voters in Raleigh and replaced them with a swath of rural counties stretching to the Virginia border.
Swing seats, meaning a district that a presidential candidate won by 5 percentage points or less in the previous election, disappear from the national map. During the decades following World War II, the number of competitive seats in the House gradually eroded. the United States has become more polarizedvoters were less likely to split their ticket across parties, and people moved closer to like-minded neighbors, creating Democratic strongholds in urban areas and Republican strongholds throughout rural America.
This decline has accelerated over the past year after Republican President Donald Trump triggered a partisan redistricting battle. The number of swing neighborhoods fell from 45 to 37. There were 96 House seats that met the modern definition of a swing seat in 1964, according to a count from the 1970s, when the declining number of these districts was first noted.
This means that the overwhelming majority of House seats are actually won in the primarieswith the support of only a fraction of voters who are generally at the extreme ideological end of their party.
Nickel saw the impact of this decision during his single term in Washington.
“The biggest division I found in Congress was not between Democrats and Republicans, but between safe seats and competitive seats,” Nickel said. “When your goal is to run a campaign where you talk to every voter, you see things differently and your goal is to solve problems. »
Unite America, an organization promoting alternatives to party primaries, calculated that 87% of representatives elected to the House in 2024 were chosen by 7% of the nation’s voters.
“Voters have no way to hold Congress accountable except for a narrow window of swing districts,” Nick Troiano, the group’s executive director, said in an interview, adding that he expects things to get worse in November. “The least competitive election of our lifetimes will lead to the least accountable and representative Congress of our lifetimes. »
Narrow battlefield expands slightly in unpredictable midterm year
Republicans hope the reduced number of competitive seats will limit the number of seats Democrats can win on November 3.
“Both sides are fighting on a narrow battlefield in the House,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign. “It’s a knife fight in a dark alley.”
The alley could expand this yearbut it’s still an alley.
Democrats have expanded their policy goals, given the unpopular war with Iran and voters unhappy with high prices. Both parties are spending on Republican zone campaigns that would not normally be competitive.
Even in what promises to be a difficult political environment, Republicans are nevertheless protected by the limited number of seats at stake.
“Even if there is the kind of turnaround we had in 2006, there won’t be 40 seats that change hands. There will be 20 seats that change hands,” said Ian Shapiro, a political scientist at Yale.
There is a long-standing debate among academics over the extent to which this decline can be attributed to partisan redistrictingknown as gerrymandering, and the extent to which Americans are increasingly inclined to live among like-minded people who vote the same way. Several studieshaving found that without partisan gerrymandering, the House would have about double the number of competitive seats it currently has.
One thing that is most agreed upon is that the reduction in competitive seats leads to greater polarization because legislators are only beholden to primary voters.
“It produces more alienation because Congress is doing nothing but investigating and positioning,” Shapiro said.
Study mathematics and make a decision
Nickel decided not to run for reelection after studying election results dating back to 2016 and finding that no Democratic incumbent had held on to a seat where Trump received 55% or more of the vote. Trump received 58% of the vote in the new district.
Nickel, which had introduced a bill requiring all states to use a non-partisan redistricting systeminitially said he would run for U.S. Senate because statewide seats can’t be hand-picked. But when former governor Roy Cooper After announcing he was running for the Democratic nomination, Nickel ran for attorney in Wake County, the deeply Democratic county that was largely excluded from the 13th District.
Nickel won the Democratic primary and will take office in January. No Republicans showed up.
This shows how separated North Carolina and the country have actually become by political party.
“If you just draw big blocks around a state, you’ll get uncompetitive districts because we’re very polarized,” said Joshua Huder, a political scientist at Georgetown University.
At one o’clock, a very different state
According to Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in North Carolina, only 15 percent of North Carolina’s voting districts could be classified as politically competitive.
“For the average North Carolinian, depending on where they live, if they drive an hour in any direction, they will find themselves in a very different North Carolina than the one they live in,” he said.
This is certainly the case between the old 13th arrondissement and the new one. Office towers, cafes and gourmet restaurants of downtown Raleigh which were part of the competitive 13th District, it is about a 90-minute drive north through the housing developments and soybean and tobacco farms that are the heart of the new conservative district.
Few people here talk about the congressional race. Although many express dissatisfaction with the direction the country is heading, they see no reason to vote for anyone other than a Republican.
“That’s exactly who I’ve always been,” said Linda Long, 62, a Republican from the town of Roxboro who works at the local Walmart.
George Scott, a retired architectural engineer from Franklinton, viscerally dislikes Trump, but he’s also a lifelong Republican and hopes to continue voting that way.
“He’s just a person,” Scott, 75, said of the president.
Democrats play role in far-flung district
This is what Paul Barringer is up against.
The Democratic candidate against Knott is hoping for a surprise in a year when even Republican members in safe seats like the 13th District, they are afraid. Neither Knott’s office nor his campaign responded to an interview request.
Recently, Barringer drove his 2011 Toyota Land Cruiser, with his two dogs in the back, to the home of Mary Blank, who heads the chapter of the liberal group Indivisible in Johnston County, a fast-growing, conservative-leaning area just outside Raleigh.
Barringer, a former health care attorney who returned from Maryland to the District tree farm where he grew up to care for his ailing mother, said he was previously a Republican but switched parties to run, hoping he could attract voters of all stripes.
“I think people are unhappy with things that are happening,” Barringer said. “They want people who will find ways to work together. »
On the back porch of the house, he was greeted enthusiastically by a self-described political minority of liberals from the conservative area. At one point, Barringer spoke about the backbreaking task of tobacco processing and asked everyone who had undergone this rural rite of passage in North Carolina to raise their hands. Nobody did it.
“We are all transplants! » » called a woman.
The enthusiasm was palpable, especially after Barringer noted that national Democrats had put this seat on a list of candidates to watch in case of a possible upset. Blank, a 73-year-old retired social studies teacher from New Jersey, said it gave her hope, but she was realistic about local dynamics.
“I’ve said all along I don’t think Paul can win,” Blank said.
Linwood Parker agrees. “They’re blowing smoke,” Parker, the 78-year-old mayor of Four Oaks, a town 26 miles south of Blank’s home, said of Democrats’ hopes of winning the district.
Parker is a lifelong Republican who knows well that gerrymandering is a decades-old tradition in North Carolina. The Democrats did this ruthlessly to maintain their control over the legislature and the congressional delegation until they lost power in the 2010 wave. Now, it is the Republicans who are changing the maps to benefit their party.
Parker agrees even though he says he’s not a fan of gerrymandering, or the polarization that has eaten away at bipartisan trust in society.
“Redistricting is just one of the levers that Republicans have to pull when they’re in charge,” Parker said. “Otherwise, it’s like saying when we play this baseball game, we’ll have three outs, we’ll give you two.”
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